Three-Day Outage Testament to RIM’s “Unprecedented Track Record of Reliability”

After its humiliating worldwide BlackBerry network outage earlier this month, you’d think that Research In Motion would be steeling itself for a subscriber exodus. Not so, according to RIM’s U.K. managing director Stephen Bates, who expects affected BlackBerry users to shrug off the three-day disruption, in light of RIM’s history of network constancy.

“We have an unprecedented track record of reliability,” Bates told Mobile News, evidently without a hint of irony. “Our focus is on providing the best communications experience and the feedback we get from our customers is we normally deliver on that. BlackBerry is about the ultimate communications platform. There is a market for that, people see the value in it and will choose that over other platforms.”

That’s the hope, anyway. And as Bates notes, RIM’s network uptime does average about 99 percent. Not too shabby.

That said, it’s certainly possible that the duration of the latest outage will inspire businesses and consumers alike to rethink their use of the BlackBerry. The quality and reliability of the device’s email and messaging system has long been its biggest selling point. But after this outage, you’ve got to imagine it’s a bit tarnished.

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